


Howl

by skivvysupreme



Series: The Wax Verse [11]
Category: Glee
Genre: Aftermath of Violence, Alternate Universe - Supernatural Elements, Blood and Injury, Gen, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, M/M, Sadie Hawkins Dance, Violence, Werewolves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-26
Updated: 2015-05-26
Packaged: 2018-04-01 10:43:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,247
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4016749
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skivvysupreme/pseuds/skivvysupreme
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Recovery was slow. Then it was fast. And then it was terrifying. (The night Blaine gets turned into a werewolf coincides with the school dance from hell, because when it rains, it pours.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Howl

**Author's Note:**

> Takes place two years prior to Blaine meeting Kurt, in the spring before Blaine enrolls at Dalton Academy.
> 
> (This series is written out of order. If you'd like a chronological list, I'm on tumblr under the same name, and have a masterpost for this verse which notes the story order!)

The world was red, and it was sideways, and it hurt.

Blaine opened his eyes, or tried to before he realized blood was trickling down his face and had to blink a few times to try and clear it. His face stung. His left arm was stuck underneath him on bloody pavement, bent in a way it shouldn't have, and the left side of his torso pulsed with pain and made it hurt to breathe. He was a little lightheaded, ears ringing, but as he tried gather his thoughts, he remembered:

_The dance. Sadie Hawkins. I have a date._

Blaine raised his head a little, slowly, and watched his date's feet running away across the pavement. "BLAINE, RUN!" he screamed, and the two guys chasing him kept after him as the third spun around and looked at Blaine.

He lay still, playing possum, because he didn't know how fast he could get away but knew he'd never escape without a head start. And at the moment, breathing was more difficult than anything else, so Blaine closed his eyes to slits and tried to inhale.

The last guy looked him over, saw that he was down for the count, and kept running.

Blaine rolled over onto his stomach, crying, and pushed himself to his knees, cradling his broken arm in his lap. He put a hand to the throbbing, bleeding gash in his forehead, stretched his jaw, and felt a hot, swollen cut in his lip. He tried to stop crying—crying made his chest heave painfully, stirring that sharp ache in his side, and he was already struggling for breath—but he couldn’t do it. It wasn’t just the pain; it was the fear and the anger and utter disbelief and disappointment that the world really was this awful.

He lifted his head—that hurt, everything _hurt_ —and looked around. The events of the past ten minutes came back to him, then: _We ran to the parking lot. We tried to get away. We didn’t._ Blaine could try to get back to the school and find one of the dance’s chaperones, but the parking lot felt, at that moment, like an impossibly vast gravel sea, lit up bright by the big, white, full moon overhead, leaving him open and vulnerable if/when those guys came back for him. The football field, gated and locked, lay to his left; the school, farther away than Blaine’s aching body considered comfortable, was in front of him; and the dark, rustling woods were two rows of parking spots behind him.

Blaine couldn’t see anything past the first row of trees. The woods seemed impenetrable. And he needed to hide, needed somewhere he knew he would have time to rest and call for help.

A loud howl, long and plaintive, erupted from somewhere deep in the forest.

It wasn’t like the school had proven itself any safer.

He pushed himself to his feet and started to walk towards the trees.

The pain in his side flared, and he held his arm as still as he could against his chest. Blaine was crying in earnest now, unable to ignore the pain or lessen it in any way now that he was moving. When he'd reached a comfortable distance away from the edge of the woods, about ten trees deep, Blaine finally fell to his knees in the dirt. It was quiet, save for his sniffling and the leaves rustling above his head, so Blaine took a couple of minutes to try and catch his breath. Then he pulled his phone from his pocket, wiped his bloody, dirty hand on his white shirt, and dialed.

_"911, what is your emergency?"_

"I—I need help. Please c-call an ambulance, I'm at Johnson Middle School. In the woods, close to the parking lot."

_"What's your name? How old are you?"_

"My name's Blaine, I'm fourteen. Please help."

_"Sending an ambulance right now, honey. It's on its way. Can you tell me what happened?"_

“These guys jumped us, my date, he’s—I don’t know where he is, he ran but they were chasing him, I don’t know—I, _ow_ …”

_“Blaine, I need you to breathe. Are there any adults around you? Are you in a safe place?”_

“I’m alone. But, yeah, I’m hiding in case they come back, I don’t think they’ll find me. Please hurry.”

_“The ambulance will be there soon, Blaine. Do you want me to stay on the line with you until it gets there?”_

“N-no, that’s okay, I’m just—I don’t know how badly Daniel’s hurt, they were… I don’t know if he got away, please make sure they find him.”

_“They will, honey. They’re coming to help both of you.”_

“Thank you.”

Blaine put his phone back in his pocket and reached up to loosen his tie. It was already pulled tighter than it should have been, like the guys had used it to grab him and keep him in place, but everything was a little fuzzy and that wasn’t a detail he wanted to visualize. He pulled the tie off completely, throwing it in the dirt.

Twigs crunched underfoot behind him, and then a low growl pulled the hair on the back of Blaine’s neck to attention.

Blaine turned around, slowly, still on his knees, and came face to face with a huge gray wolf with bright blue eyes. He started shaking, but made no other moves, both because he’d heard you weren’t supposed to make sudden moves around wild animals and because panic and terror kept him frozen in place. This night couldn’t keep getting worse, it _couldn’t,_ because the universe was more balanced than that and there was a limit to how badly things could go at any given point, wasn’t there?

The wolf kept growling, stepping slowly towards him with its head low and its sharp teeth bared.

Blaine sat down and inched backwards clumsily, only able to hold himself up and push himself back with one arm. The wolf followed, until Blaine finally fell onto his back and just lay there with his eyes shut tight, crying. “Please, please, please…” Blaine whispered, purely an instinct of fear, since he wasn’t sure what good begging a wolf would do. He could hear the sirens getting louder and louder in the distance, the ambulance was coming, he was so close—

The wolf licked him, right over the bleeding gash in his forehead.

Blaine yelped, the shock and pain popping his eyes open. The wolf was inches from his face, sniffing him, surveying him carefully; as it looked back up at him, their eyes met for one long, still moment.

Then the wolf growled again, and pain suddenly exploded through Blaine’s leg as the wolf bit down on his thigh.

Blaine’s scream was drowned by the ambulance siren wailing across the parking lot.

*********

Blaine had stitches in his forehead, two fractured ribs on his left side, a broken left arm and pinky finger in a cast and a little splint, and a gauze bandage wrapped around the huge bite in his right thigh. A tiny bandage covered the spot in his arm where the nurses had taken blood for a (negative) rabies test, after he’d let them know he’d been bitten in the forest but that the wolf had run away immediately after.

That wasn’t entirely true, though. The wolf had watched Blaine limp back to the parking lot, had waited quietly until Blaine caught the attention of the EMT jumping out of the front seat of the ambulance, before trotting away and disappearing into the dense trees. Blaine wasn’t really sure why he’d lied about that little detail. It seemed simpler.

The nurses had to pick and rinse tiny chunks of gravel from Blaine’s face. At some point, they deduced, Blaine had been slammed to the pavement face-first, resulting in that ugly gash in his forehead, and then slammed again, causing tiny cuts and scrapes all across his face and leaving asphalt in his skin. He would have scars, but he was lucky his nose hadn’t broken.

Lucky, they said.

Blaine’s parents sat off to the side, watching the nurses work—and, oh, the agony he’d been in, waiting for them to reach the hospital, because no one was allowed to do anything until his parents showed up. Pamela was shaking, clutching her husband’s hand in a vice grip as Paul sat next to her like a stone, his face drawn and angry as his bright blue eyes stared off into space.

The police, shocking no one but Blaine, said they had very little to go on, since Blaine could only remember one of the attacker’s faces—the one who had glanced back at him to make sure he was injured enough to stay down—and the other two would surely provide him an alibi, which no one could disprove. No one but Daniel, Blaine’s date, who was nowhere to be seen when the ambulance showed up.

The police caught up with him that night, since Blaine, worried out of his mind, had given them Daniel’s address so they could look for him. Daniel told the police that he couldn’t say who had attacked them, either, so he wouldn’t press charges.

Blaine knew better. Daniel remembered all three faces, but he was afraid. And, as if to cement Blaine’s hunch, a text was waiting for him when he looked at his phone: **I’m not going after them. If you do, leave me out of it. Please don’t call me again.**

That night, Blaine lay on his back in bed, exhausted, drowsy from his pain medication, and listened to his parents as they went back and forth downstairs.

“I knew we shouldn’t have let him go with a boy.”

“What? This isn’t his fault!”

“I know it isn’t! Jesus. I know. But it certainly didn’t help.”

“You think we should teach him to be scared all the time?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Pam, of course not, but he needs to be smart if he’s going to be gay.”

“If he’s—? There’s no ‘if.’ Your son is gay and you’re an asshole.”

“I just want him to be safe!”

“Then Blaine isn’t the one who needs to be dealt with. It’s the monsters who did this to him and the dipshits at that school who let this happen. Don’t be one of them.”

“That’s not fair.”

“Oh, right, because we’re talking about things that are _fair_ right now, aren’t we?”

“We’re done talking about this.”

“I agree. Sleep in the guest bedroom tonight.”

Blaine heard his mom coming up the stairs. Turning over would be painful, and he couldn’t bury his face in his pillow anyway, so he just breathed as steadily as he could around the heavy lump in his throat and tried not to sniffle too loudly.

His mom, being his mom, heard him anyway.

“Bumblebee? Are you still awake?” she asked softly, inching his door open and throwing a sliver of light across his room.

He wanted to pretend he was out like a light. He wanted to pretend he wasn’t furious with nearly everyone and everything and fighting the traitorous impulse that told him his father was right and he’d been stupid. Hell, he wanted to have slept through that entire conversation. But none of the above was happening. He sighed, eyes wet and so very _tired_ , and said, small and quiet, “Mom?”

She was across the room in an instant and sat gently on the edge of his bed, leaning over him and pressing a kiss to an unscratched part of his forehead. “I’m here, baby. It’s going to be all right.”

“Dad, he—“

“He’s an idiot. He… he’s worried for you, and he loves you, but he’s also an idiot. Shhh, baby, it’s time to go to sleep. Just rest now, okay? You’re home, you’re going to be all right.”

Blaine let his mom’s fingernails, scratching gently across his scalp, soothe him until he was finally quiet.

“Thanks, Mom,” he said, the rush of gratitude bringing tears to his eyes again.

“I love you so much, Blainey.”

“Love you, too.”

He fell asleep with her fingers in his hair.

*****

Recovery was slow.

The morning after Blaine’s release from the hospital, he woke in darkness, the sun not having risen yet but his initial dose of pain medication having worn off. Every part of him ached; his left side, with the broken arm, finger, and fractured ribs, complained if he so much as thought about rolling onto it, and that bite in his right leg was still throbbing, making it impossible to find a comfortable position to sleep in. He took another pain pill from the little orange canister on his nightstand and waited for it to kick in so he could try to fall back to sleep.

For the next week, that was how Blaine spent his late nights and early mornings. His days were as numb as he could make them, his medication dulling most sensations as he kept his headphones on, eyes closed, blotting out everything. If the universe was kind, he could sleep his way through this whole painful mess, cocooned in his bed and trying not to remember anything about that night.

It worked, mostly.

Except, he couldn’t escape what had happened when it was time for him to take a shower, and he had to stand awkwardly in the tub, halfway under the water so as not to get his cast wet. He saw that awful night again when he looked in the bathroom mirror at the bruised and battered version of himself, and knew that the little cuts might heal but that no amount of skin cream would fix that stitched-up gash in his forehead. As long as that was there, the night could never leave him. And afterwards, when he was back in a loose pair of boxers and his mom was re-dressing the wound in his leg—because, with one arm, Blaine couldn’t do it himself—he saw the wolf again.

Instinct told Blaine that the wolf’s attack had been a conscious decision, but, again… that didn’t make any sense.

His mom looked at him, as she did most of the time, now, in a rather fierce sort of way. She was furious, but not at him, so she tried to keep a bright, encouraging smile on her face despite the fact that her luminous brown eyes looked as though angry tears could fall from them at any moment. She pressed Blaine to talk about what had happened. Painful as it was, as she explained it, she wanted to know exactly what had happened to her baby boy, but that didn’t outweigh Blaine’s desire to not relive it. So he complied, to an extent, but he always shut her down before getting to the harsher details, telling her that he was getting tired and couldn’t remember much anyway.

His father just looked like he didn’t know what to say, so he said very little. Given the things Blaine had overheard him say to his mother, both before and after the incident, Blaine was grateful for that.

Blaine supposed it was a result of his new secluded lifestyle that everything around him suddenly smelled sharper. He found the scent of his own room comforting, as well as his mom’s perfume and his dad’s aftershave (which he seemed to be able to smell as soon as either of them opened his bedroom door). He’d also taken to keeping his window open at all hours to let the outdoors in, filling his room with the smell of trees and flowers and freshly mown grass. It soothed him.

Still, it was easier and far less stressful to stay inside.

His parents’ arguing lessened that sometimes, but one thing they seemed to agree on was that Blaine going back to his school was out of the question. Blaine was fine with that, since he didn’t want to set foot on that campus ever again. Blaine’s stellar reputation as a hardworking, dedicated student (and the fact that the semester only had a month and a half left anyway) meant his teachers would let him finish all his work at home. When his father came up to his room and sat down next to his bed with a brochure from Dalton Academy, his father’s private, all-boys alma mater, Blaine agreed without a second thought.

Blaine often found himself staring at the waning moon whenever it was visible through his window. It was a comforting sight, though he couldn’t articulate why. As his second week at home passed, and the moon got smaller and smaller each night, it became the last thing he saw before he fell asleep.

*****

Someone was knocking louder than necessary on Blaine’s bedroom door.

“Blainey? You awake, Squirt?”

Blaine was awake now, thanks to the noisy entrance, and he sat up in bed slowly, making sure not to move his arm around too much. “Cooper?”

His unfairly tall older brother strode quickly across the room, grinning his blazing white smile as he dumped his suitcase on the floor and threw himself onto Blaine’s bed. He grabbed Blaine in a tight hug, carefully avoiding his broken arm, and said, “Sorry I didn’t get here sooner, I had a few commercials and then Mom and Dad said I should wait until you were feeling better.” He didn’t comment on Blaine’s injuries, or the scars on his face.

Blaine tucked his nose against Cooper’s shoulder and just breathed him in for a moment. Having another familiar person there who wasn’t either of their bickering parents was such a relief. And even if he didn’t always smell the same, because he changed his cologne according to whatever the newest, trendiest designer scent was, he always smelled like _Cooper_.

Blaine had been focusing on scent so much, lately. He’d never really noticed it like this before.

“It’s okay, Coop. Glad you’re here now.”

Cooper gave him one last squeeze and hopped off the bed. He clapped his hands together, his ice-blue eyes lighting up in that way Blaine knew signaled some exciting new venture, then started digging around in his suitcase. “You are never gonna guess what I have in store for you, baby brother. My agent gave me the finished copies of my latest commercials, and they are absolutely going to blow your mind. I hope you’re ready. This is real Hollywood work right here.”

Blaine dropped his chin to his chest, laughing, and that felt amazing, because Blaine hadn’t laughed in weeks. If there was anyone in the world who could take his mind off things, who wouldn’t make him talk about the attack or treat him like it was the only thing worth discussing in his life anymore, it was Cooper. Cooper would see “brother” first, and “victim” second.

Well, Cooper would probably see Cooper first, but that was close enough.

*****

Recovery, quite suddenly, wasn’t slow anymore.

On the morning of Blaine’s first follow-up appointment with his pediatrician, the morning after the moon reappeared in his window having grown into a thin, silver crescent, he found that his cuts had healed, his stitches dissolved, and his face was as smooth and unmarred as it had been the day before Sadie Hawkins.

“You look great, Blaine. How are you feeling?”

“Really, really good. Great, actually.”

Dr. Marquez came closer, gently turning Blaine’s face with her gloved hands. “The contusion on your forehead has healed beautifully. The little ones have faded well, too, but I wouldn’t think there’d been a cut here if I hadn’t already known.”

“Yeah, no scarring at all, it’s crazy. I’m really happy about that. Is that vain of me?” Blaine shrugs, scrunching his nose.

“I wouldn’t think you’d want memories of such a bad night, Blaine. That’s not vain at all,” she replied, and a sad smile flitted across her face before she waved a hand in the air and said, “And even if it is, who cares?”

Blaine laughed. He’d always liked Dr. Marquez. She reminded him a lot of his mother.

“How about your ribs? One to ten, how would you rate your pain?”

“Oh, I haven’t even thought about my ribs in a while. My arm feels okay, too. So I guess a 1 for both? Except the cast is really, really itchy now.”

Dr. Marquez raised an eyebrow. “It’s been three weeks. Fractured ribs usually take about six to heal completely, and these were bad fractures. A bad break in that arm, too.”

Blaine blinked, trying to think of the last time his internal injuries had bothered him. It was right after Cooper came home, maybe, just over two weeks after the dance. “I don’t think they’ve really hurt for about a week, honestly. I’ve been breathing fine, too.”

“Well, we’ll see in a moment. Let me get your x-rays up and we’ll take a look.”

Ten minutes later, she was on the phone that hung from the office wall, holding the receiver with her shoulder as she slid the x-rays back into their large blue folder.

“Yeah, tell tech they sent up the wrong x-rays. Yes, I’m sure. I need—What do you mean? I’m—yes. Blaine Anderson, male, fourteen years old, chest and arm x-rays? I know, but that can’t be right. Because these are—you’re sure? Well. All right. Thanks.” Dr. Marquez took the x-rays back out of their folder and fastened them to the light board.

Blaine watched her nervously, fidgeting in his seat. “Doctor? Is something wrong?”

She stared at the x-rays, shaking her head, then turned and looked at Blaine with her head tilted as if she wasn’t quite sure what she was looking at. “No, nothing’s wrong. Absolutely nothing. You’ve healed. Completely.”

*****

Blaine’s parents were so encouraged by his miraculous recovery that they finally felt comfortable enough to leave Blaine with Cooper, and go on what Paul referred to as “a little breather” and Pam blatantly called “couple’s therapy.” The point was, they would be gone for two weeks, and Blaine had never felt more relieved. He could use a break from his pack.

Besides, things were starting to get weird.

Blaine’s fixation with staring out of his bedroom window became a full-tilt obsession, and now that his cast and bandages were removed, he’d taken to leaning halfway out the window, his elbows resting on the windowsill, as he sat and watched the world outside, its symphony of scents washing over him.

An obnoxious little squirrel was perched on the tree not far from his window, attempting to crack open a nut against the branch it was sitting on, and Blaine didn’t even realize he was _growling_ at it until Cooper passed by his open bedroom door and said, “Uh, Squirt?”

 _“What.”_ Blaine snarled, then cleared his throat and repeated, “Sorry, what?”

Cooper stared at him, at a loss, looking so much the spitting image of their father that Blaine almost started growling again.

“Squirrel,” Blaine said, shrugging, as though that was all the explanation Cooper needed, and he sat in the chair next to his bed, trying not to look back at the aggravating little creature in the tree despite that annoying nut-cracking noise.

“Did it do something to offend you?”

“Yes. I mean—no?”

Cooper hummed. “Method, I get it. Keeping yourself sharp. Hey, did I tell you about the time I got to be a stand-in for Daniel Day Lewis? Now _that’s_ a method actor, I gotta tell you…”

The squirrel ran off, so Blaine sat back in his chair and tried not to fidget too much as Cooper sat on his bed and talked for the next two hours about his experiences on Hollywood film sets.

One night, almost a month after the dance, Blaine and Cooper were camped out on Blaine’s bed with snacks and an overabundance of pillows, watching his favorite Harry Potter movie. This was the kind of thing Blaine missed most about his pack being together: as much as he loved his parents, hanging out with his brother was a completely different experience. Cooper was funny, enthusiastic, took bizarre, absurd things seriously, and threw himself headfirst into everything.

“Franchises, man,” Cooper sighed, taking a swig of his cherry Coke. “This is where it’s at. You get cast in one, you get cast in seven. Seven!”

“Eight. They’re talking about making the last one into two.”

Cooper sighed and shoved another Oreo into his mouth. “Shit.”

Blaine grinned and clapped a hand on Cooper’s shoulder. “You could never have been cast in this anyway, if it makes you feel any better. You’re not British.”

“I do a damn good accent. I could have got away with it,” Cooper replied, in said accent. Then he switched to another as he said, “My Irish is better, though.”

Blaine laughed, and he had to admit: Cooper was good at that. He looked back at the screen, where a huge, full moon had appeared. It was gorgeous. “Could you play a werewolf?” he asked his brother, watching the way Professor Lupin’s body shuddered and shifted in the moonlight. The sight set Blaine’s teeth on edge and he felt an odd, crawling feeling under his skin.

“Of course I could, I’m an intense actor. It’s just like any role, it’s all about commitment, you know? Gotta feel it in your bones.”

Professor Lupin howled, and Blaine felt it from the base of his tailbone to the back of his neck.

*****

Blaine woke up alone in his room the next morning, completely nude. And that was odd, because Blaine made a point to wear pajamas and knew he’d gone to sleep clothed. He looked over the side of the bed and saw them, his t-shirt, sweatpants, and underwear, lying in a pile on the floor as though he’d flung them off in his sleep. He had a tendency to overheat under his covers at night, but he never slept naked, despite the fact that he did feel warmer than usual. He was strangely itchy, too, some restless ache buzzing under his skin as he yawned and stretched on top of his covers.

 _Outside_.

Blaine sat up, stretched again, and shook his head, his curls loose and sleep-mussed. He rose from his bed and went to the window, opening it wide, then bent and breathed deep, the outdoor air bringing him all sorts of amazing scents. There were squirrels and trees and dirt and flowers and people and countless other smells. Everything that mattered was outside, wasn’t it? And he’d been cooped up in his house for far too long anyway, hadn’t he?

_Run._

He left his room and jogged down the stairs, ready to bolt out the front door—

“Whoa! What the hell are you doing?” Cooper was sat in the living room, sipping a cup of coffee with some entertainment magazine in his lap, his eyes wide and his eyebrows threatening to disappear into his hair as he stared at Blaine.

“I’m going for a run,” Blaine shrugged. “I need… I have to go outside.”

“Okay, I know you’ve been stuck inside a lot lately, and I’m all for being proud of your body, but you might wanna put on clothes before you go, Squirt. Dad will kill me if I let you get arrested for public indecency.”

Blaine looked down at himself. It hadn’t occurred to him to put on clothing. Even standing naked in front of Cooper, he knew he should care, but… clothes seemed really stupid all of a sudden.

He stood there, looking out the window next to the front door, until Cooper cleared his throat and said, “Blaine? Everything okay? Can you at least put on underwear?”

“Oh. Um, yeah. I’ll go do that. But then I’m going outside.”

Cooper gave him a worried-looking smile and said, “Sure, Blainey. You could use some fresh air. Going stir-crazy in here, huh?”

“I need to go outside.”

“Okay. Outside. Got it.”

Blaine nodded and ran upstairs. Two minutes later, he was back down, in thin sweatpants and a tank top, and he yelled, “Outside now, see you later, Coop!” and was gone.

He wasn’t even wearing shoes, but thankfully, Cooper hadn’t noticed that.

As soon as he hit the front porch, Blaine was in heaven.

The sun was warm on his skin, and everything smelled amazing. He jogged through his neighborhood, bare feet slapping across the pavement and his ungelled curls bouncing on top of his head. It was impossibly bright outside, but not in a blinding way. The world just seemed more saturated, more alive, and as Blaine ran, he started to lose track of time. He knew hours were passing by the way the sun moved overhead, but other than that, Blaine didn’t think much about it. He was free. He could go anywhere.

How the hell had he spent so much time indoors these past few weeks? Why wasn’t he OUTSIDE?

His phone buzzed in his pocket with a text from Cooper: **Coming back sometime soon? Left a long time ago…**

Blaine could barely keep still enough to answer it. **Yeah just enjoying the weather!!!!!!!!!! :D**

**Ur acting cray cray, u ok?**

**Im great be back in time for dinner bye**

Blaine kept running. And when his phone buzzed again, he didn’t answer it.

As the sun started to get lower and lower in the sky, a set of familiar scents started wafting towards him, drawing him around corners and down seemingly random streets like a silent GPS. He didn’t know where he was going, but as he followed the smell, he got angrier. And _angrier._

This smell was a threat. It was a person—no, three, it was three men, Blaine understood now—who had hurt him. They were the ones who hurt him and Daniel on that terrible night, which Blaine, seeing no justice on the horizon, had tried to forget. Every bit of anger Blaine had suppressed since that night came roaring back to the surface. Fury coiled hot in his stomach and he found himself trembling with rage as the night came back to him, more vivid in his memory than ever before. Scent had a not-so-funny way of doing that.

He’d been bleeding, broken on the pavement, cornered and alone. It was _them._

And suddenly, smoking cigarettes in the darkening alley behind the bakery, they were right there in front of him.

Blaine didn’t give them time to react before he attacked. They certainly hadn’t given him that opportunity.

Afterwards, Blaine staggered back to his front porch, panting and trying to calm down but having no success. He was shaking, dizzy, sweating, and his vision kept going in and out of focus. His thoughts were jumbled and darting all over the place, and the little bit that he could keep straight in his head made no rational sense anyway.

Something was very, very wrong.

“Cooper!” he screamed, fumbling frantically with the doorknob—or, he tried to scream, since it came out as a high-pitched yelp instead of his brother’s name. He got inside the house, moving towards the living room, and tried again, focusing everything he had on making his mouth work. “Cooper?”

“Blaine? Jesus, I was about to—Whoa, hey, what’s going on?”

Blaine dropped to the floor in the living room, and Cooper immediately jumped out of his chair and knelt next to him.

“Don’t know. Help,” Blaine cried. “I hurt someone, found them, the guys who—Sadie’s. I—” Another whine, entirely canine, fell from his mouth, and he curled in on himself. His skin felt like it was on fire and his bones ached with the need to stretch. “Cooper. Hurts.”

Cooper put a hand to Blaine’s sweaty forehead. “Holy shit, you’re burning up, I’ll take you to the hospital—and, wait, your eyes, what’s up with your eyes, why are they _glowing_ , Blainey—?“

“Please—something’s—” Blaine pressed his face to the floor, lifted onto his knees, and screamed into the carpet.

*

Cooper had thought, after living in Los Angeles for a substantial amount of time, that he wasn’t fazed by much. Hollywood was weird, and if he could handle Hollywood, then he could handle anything. But as he sat, screaming, back flat against the wall, watching his baby brother’s body twist and stretch into a wolf’s, it was clear that he’d had no idea what "anything" could entail.

Blaine rose to his feet—no, his _paws_ —unsteadily, swaying a little as he shook out his fur. He was black and gray, and his eyes were bright yellow beneath two triangular, lighter patches of fur—his ridiculous eyebrows, Cooper realized, laughing in shock even as the horror of what he’d just seen gripped his body. And Blaine was sort of fluffy, and not as big or menacing as a full-grown wolf would be; he was a child, still, barely fourteen years old, and he had the body of a teenage wolf cub to show for it.

Blaine whimpered, confused as he sniffed at his ripped clothing on the floor underneath him, and trotted towards Cooper as soon as he spotted him. Cooper got to his feet and ran around Blaine on reflex, not thinking, backing away—and Blaine let out a heartbreaking little howl and sat down on his back legs, pawing at the ground in Cooper’s direction.

This was still his baby brother, even if he was a… a _werewolf_ , Cooper thought, his heart pounding in his chest. That was the only thing Blaine could be, and Cooper had no room to debate about whether they did or did not exist now that he had one in front of him. Cooper got down on his knees and opened his arms, and Blaine came running, clumsy on these new legs like he didn’t know how to wolf yet. Cooper gathered him into his arms, digging his hands in the soft fur, and Blaine started whining and licking his cheek. He could feel Blaine shaking, still, and it occurred to Cooper that this must be his first time. Blaine had been panicking as it happened, seemed completely blindsided by the whole bizarre affair—and Cooper realized, as he glanced out the living room window and spotted the big full moon lighting up the night sky, that Blaine’s random run-in with a wolf the night of Sadie Hawkins must have been the moment that made the impossible possible.

“Shhh, hey, little brother, you’re okay. You’re okay.” Cooper scratched behind Blaine’s ears and up and down his back, trying to soothe him, and Blaine cuddled closer, tucking his head under Cooper’s chin as his whines started to quiet down.

No part of that night, that terrible night of Sadie Hawkins, should have happened to his little brother. It shouldn’t have happened to anyone. But now, with this frightened little wolf cub in his arms, Cooper thought that maybe, just maybe, they’d found the silver lining.

*****

The first thing Blaine noticed when he woke up, yawning into the early morning sunlight beaming through his open window, was that he was _starving_.

The second was that he was buck naked, again, but wrapped in a thin blanket this time, and that Cooper was snoring loudly in his ear where he lay on top of the covers on Blaine’s bed. Blaine was curled up towards him, his head on Cooper’s chest, clutching Cooper’s t-shirt in his fist. His _human_ fist.

Blaine had never been so happy to see skin on his hand.

“Cooper? Cooper, wake up.”

Cooper yawned and cracked an eye open, glancing down at him. “Sounds like someone’s not a puppy anymore. Morning, Squirt.”

“I—I wasn’t dreaming that? I haven’t lost my mind?”

“Nope.”

“I’m… a werewolf?”

“Looks like it.”

Blaine curled closer, his brother’s warm scent the only thing keeping him anchored as he struggled to process everything. His thoughts were still a mess, and he didn’t feel all the way _there_ yet; one thing, however, seemed pretty clear in all the madness. “You should lock me up,” he whispered, clutching Cooper’s shirt for dear life. “I’m dangerous to people now. I attacked someone. They got up, they got away, but—“

“The douchebags from Sadie Hawkins? Yeah, I caught that. It's fine. They can't come forward without risking outing themselves as your attackers. Tell me they didn’t deserve it.”

And Blaine couldn’t. Rationally, he thought it was wrong, but the wolf—well, the wolf was another story. Blaine understood now: his rapid recovery, all those odd impulses he’d had over the past couple weeks, the preoccupation with scent, the squirrel rage—all that was the wolf, growing stronger and stronger with the waxing moon. So while the boy grappled with guilt, the wolf, still rumbling in his chest, seemed pretty pleased about the whole thing.

“Don’t tell Mom and Dad, Coop. Promise? I’ll… I have to figure all this out. I have to tell them when the time’s right.”

Cooper sighed and squeezed Blaine in a hug, resting his cheek against Blaine’s curly hair. “I get it. And I won’t, Blainey. I’ll help you with all this, whatever way I can. As long as you promise to let me bug you for research when I’m offered this generation’s next great werewolf role.”

Blaine snorted into Cooper’s chest. Maybe the realities of the situation would sink in later, but in that moment, he didn’t feel nearly as upset about it as he thought he probably should.

“Deal.”


End file.
